About Me

moar updates: My current employer is Canonical. I work on the juju gui team, but not on the gui. 🙂

Update: of course the about me page will change, since I’m always changing. Here is an updated bio that I wrote for my new employer Arbor Networks.

Jay Wren brings more than 20 years of experience in system administration and software development in all of university, public and private companies. After 5 years of independent consulting, Jay joined Arbor Networks and is responsible for developing and maintaining software for ASERT including the ATLAS Portal. In this role Jay is charged with developing the future ATLAS vision and preserving the originality and availability of ATLAS.

Jay comes to Arbor with extensive software development experience in Windows and Linux systems. Prior to joining Arbor, Jay wrote software for iPad for a global manufacturing company, for desktop Windows for engineering analysis for another global manufacturing company and for large scale data center remote server process management using Windows and Linux for a leading payroll processing company. The Microsoft MVP program recognized Jay as a technical expert and awarded him as a C# MVP three times.

Jay holds a MS in Computer Science and Engineer and a BS in Computer Science both from Oakland University in Rochester, MI.

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I have been writing custom software solutions for integrating Windows and Unix since 1998. My blend of traditional system administration and custom software solutions has allowed numerous enterprises to transcend platform dependence. Some of my software is still in use at a state university in Michigan.

Recently I have written software to manage specific applications deployed across hundreds of Unix servers and thousands of Windows servers remotely via a Web Management Interface. The system works without an agent utilizing standard Unix remote management protocols such as SSH.Currently I am I was an independent contractor working on Windows Forms applications for tuning embedded software control modules for a US auto manufacturer. I spend my free time writing more software, baking, and watching far too much television.

Baking is great. I highly recommend growing your own yeast!

All that is nice, but I should start at the beginning. I was born. I begged to be taught to read, but waited until formal school. Around age 6 – I’m not exactly sure when – I learned TRS-80 compatible basic on a Sharp 1500 (Radio Shack PC2) pocket computer. My parents encouraged this by borrowing a VIC20 from my uncle for a few months before purchasing the family an Atari 800XL for Christmas around the time I was 7 or 8.

Atari 800XL was WAY better than Commodore 64 in the only area that mattered to me: BASIC. I had drawing primitives. LINE, CIRCLE and PAINT functions – or were they called subroutines – were available. I loved me some drawing. In 1987 around the time I turned 10, my family upgraded to a used Amiga 1000, with the 512K option. Thanks to the AmigaBasic 1.2 and 1.3 provided by Microsoft, I was now writing basic without line numbers. This was like QBasic or QuickBasic on a PC available years later. I struggled endless hours trying to make the North C compiler compile my hello world app. I never succeeded.

Age 14 in 1990, Dad buys the family – me – my first “PC”, a 486 DX 33Mhz with 4MB of RAM! The neighborhood store from which we bought it even pirated Windows 3.0 for us at the time. This PC had a SoundBlaster! Yes, the original 8bit Soundblaster. It was awesome. I played games and wrote BASIC and later got a 2400baud modem and started BBSing. Did I mention it was awesome?

I think my later high school years were less developmental for my programming as I discovered my favorite way to waste time: girls.

College at Oakland University gave me a B.S. in Computer Science and a couple years later an M.S. and here I am.